In this reviewer's opinion, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic titles were easily some of the most engaging RPG titles to date.
Mass Effect, a more recent title of theirs, is also a very worthy experience and one which any who has played it would
have lost quite a number of hours to.
Dragon Age, their latest installment, is no different. This game boasts that it contains several full length novels worth of dialogue and literature that will bury players in backstory and character building conversations from very early into the game.
This has been enough to put off those who are looking for a quick action fix and rightly so, as you will find yourself conversing and/or reading a lot more than you will find yourself in combat.
While this has put off those adrenaline junkies looking to just bust stuff up it is refreshing to find a game that clearly has a huge amount of work put into every aspect of it.
Beginning with that old RPG favourite of character generation you can pick one of three races, men, dwarves and elves followed by choosing a class, either warrior rogue or mage.
While every RPG worth it's salt has this necessary piece of tedium at the start (as well as the good old "kill the rats in the basement" first quest) Dragon Age has taken a new and interesting approach to this feature.
Depending on which class and race you pick, you will play one of a half dozen different beginnings. This means that were you to pick, say, a dwarf warrior, you will experience a backstory that is entirely different to an elf mage.
Granted it's only for a couple of hours gameplay then all the stories follow a more linear path but it at least gives you a reason to replay the game once you finish it, a daunting task in itself as it contains approximately 40 hours of gameplay.
In Dragon Age, the world is still recovering from a massive war with evil entities known as Darkspawn (imaginative, eh?), a war which all that is good would have lost were it not for the intervention of the "Grey Wardens", an elite group of warriors of all races and classes that managed to drive the Darkspawn back.
Several hundred years later and the influence of the Grey Wardens is greatly diminished, on top of that the Darkspawn are gathering for another bloody good scrap. Enter you.
Combat in Dragon Age is a lot more tactically based than BIoware's earlier titles. You can organise a long string of orders to give to your party, such as to heal you or themselves when their health drops below a certain point, or to always attack the strongest enemy with a certain spell/move. This can be fairly daunting at first but is very useful once you get the hang of it.
Like Mass Effect, Dragon Age just loves giving you difficult choices to make, choices that often have dire consequences and rarely have one "right" way of doing things. Generally it involves you siding with one faction to brutally murder the other. Big fun.
And what's pillaging without looting? Throughout your adventure you will be accumulating truckfulls of swag, which can be equipped to your party or sold for gold to buy more loot.
Killing enemies nets you experience, which in turn levels up your character. As you progress in levels you can add a specialisation to your class, for instance; while mages are great support characters they're really not much use in a stand up fight, if you were to speacilise and become a battle mage, however, you can fire spells with one hand and kick righteous ass with the other.
Ok, well I'm sold. I highly recommend this game to anyone who was a fan of RPGs like KOTOR, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect. So long as you're not put off by hours long conversations with nameless peasants in the streets or reams of literature about different varieties of clothing in whatever town you're in. It's a blast. Honest.
